At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy.
The Role 👋
OakNorth is looking for a Director of Product Design to own and elevate design across our product lines: Business Banking, Lending, and Personal Savings. This role is accountable for how customers experience OakNorth across digital products and brand touch points.
You will define how design contributes to business performance, product velocity, and customer outcomes. You will lead a multidisciplinary design team (Product and Content Design), partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership, and act as the single accountable owner for experience quality, coherence, and effectiveness across our products.
Design at OakNorth must operate at the intersection of customer focus, regulatory guardrails and business vision. This role exists to make that intersection work—consistently and at scale.
What we're looking for 👀
- Design impact on business and product outcomes
- Own the impact of design on key outcomes such as customer acquisition & onboarding, activation, product adoption and retention.
- Ensure design decisions are evidence-led, commercially informed, and tied to measurable outcomes—using qualitative and quantitative customer insight to inform prioritisation, trade-offs, and validation.
- Continuously raise the bar on usability, accessibility, and clarity in a highly regulated environment.
- End-to-end product experience
- Define and drive a cohesive experience strategy across all OakNorth products, platforms, and journeys.
- Translate complex financial, operational, and regulatory requirements into intuitive, human-centred experiences.
- Ensure consistency where it matters—and deliberate divergence where it improves outcomes.
- Product partnership and delivery
- Partner with Product and Engineering Directors as a true peer to shape product strategy, roadmaps, and execution.
- Embed design deeply into discovery, prioritisation, and delivery—improving both quality and speed to market.
- Balance long-term experience vision with short-term delivery realities.
- Design systems and scalability
- Own the evolution and adoption of OakNorth’s design system across products and teams.
- Ensure the system materially improves delivery speed, accessibility, and consistency—not just visual coherence.
- Partner with engineering to ensure design standards are practical, scalable, and enforced.
- Brand expression through product
- Act as the accountable owner for how the OakNorth brand is expressed across product and digital touchpoints, in close partnership with Marketing, who retain ownership of brand strategy and external communications.
- Design leadership and operations
- Build, lead, and develop a high-performing, balanced design team with clear expectations, strong feedback, and a culture of accountability.
- Set clear priorities, manage capacity, and focus effort on work that drives the greatest impact.
- Raise the overall maturity of design thinking across the organisation—not just by evangelism, but also by results.
- Set clear standards for when and how customer research is conducted, ensuring designers can independently generate insight while knowing when deeper research investment is justified.
- Technology and AI
- Apply emerging technologies, including AI, to accelerate design workflows, improve personalisation, and enhance decision-making.
- Anchor AI expectations to design productivity and decision quality
What success looks like 🏆
- Customers can complete core tasks faster, with fewer errors and less support intervention.
- Product teams ship more consistently, with stronger alignment between design intent and engineering delivery.
- The design system is actively used, trusted, and measurably improving delivery efficiency.
- Design is viewed internally as a driver of outcomes, not a service function.
- The design team is stronger, more focused, and delivering more impact without proportional headcount growth.
About you 🫵
- You are a senior design leader with a strong product mindset, comfortable operating in complexity and making difficult decisions.
- Have led design across multiple product areas or business lines in complex, regulated, or high-scale environments (e.g. fintech, SaaS, platforms).
- Are equally comfortable setting strategy and getting into the detail when required.
- Have a track record of tying design work to measurable product and business outcomes.
- Understand how to build and run design systems that genuinely scale teams and speed up delivery.
- Can influence senior stakeholders through clarity, evidence, and credibility—and are willing to challenge them when necessary.
- Have made hard prioritisation calls before, including stopping or radically simplifying work that wasn’t delivering value.
- Care deeply about craft—but care more about impact.
- Are fluent in using customer research to inform decisions, without outsourcing judgement or slowing delivery.
What makes working here better 😍
- This is a truly hybrid role, offering engineers and Product the flexibility to work from home while also providing opportunities to collaborate in person with the team when it adds value. There’s no fixed requirement for days in the office, instead, we focus on creating space for engineers & Product to engage meaningfully, whether that’s in-person for whiteboarding sessions or remote for deep focus work.
- Work-life balance 🌴 - 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays) each year, and enhanced family leave allowances.
- Competitive salary & equity 🏦 - We want people to have a serious stake in the business.
- Good kit 💻 - Your choice of the best laptop, running macOS or Ubuntu.
- Team socials 🎉 - The opportunity to get to know each other outside of work.
- Company socials 🥡 - A chance to catch up and meet new colleagues weekly over informal office breakfasts and dinners on OakNorth - or at our free barista bar every day.
- Commuter support 🚲 - We offer the cycle to work & EV scheme.
